Emergency First Aid For Relationships

Posted on January 22, 2019 by LovingLikeGod.com

first aid firstaid relationships
The following is a small but necessary side trip from our main theme – God’s kind of Love, and relationships that come from God, but I am hopeful that it will prove helpful for those who have a heart to love like God in relationship to others.

Over the past 40 years of attempting to live this out, I have come to think of myself as a lover in training. I commend this identification to you as well.

That said, there is no challenge as lovers in training so difficult and demanding as loving and being caught between two people who don’t get along or are incompatible. If you love and encourage the one, you offend and discourage the other. It is the most conflicted situation that we, as lovers in training are likely to encounter.

Here again, this is where lovers in training need to turn to the cross, and even Jesus’ garden experience the night before the cross. Jesus was caught between us and His Father, with whom we were/are incompatible. For Him to drink the cup was to associate Himself with our incompatibility. “My God, My God why hast Thou forsaken me… ?,” Psalms 22:1. This is the price of being caught between two people who don’t see eye to eye. It is the highest challenge to our faith, and the one where, more than any other, we need to identify ourselves as lovers in training.

Love!

By Jay Ferris, originally posted on April 10, 2011

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Time Out For a Brain Adjustment

Posted on January 15, 2019 by LovingLikeGod.com

brain mind head adjustment
In the past couple of days, I have been prompted to revisit this from my more recent money book, Are You Worried Yet…:

What I saw was a choice between two kinds of “time-shares,” two places to rest, two places to live, even a choice between two kingdoms. How can we leave the one, without entering the other?  Getting out of Babylon, it seems, is a call to every one of us, but where are we to go if we are given no alternative? Does “the gospel” consign us to some kind of mental holding pattern until Jesus comes back? Why should people living in darkness want a piece of that action?

We need to live in the Spirit’s alternative to Babylon; we need to live there now. My experience tells me that this is well within reach of the faith once delivered to the saints, and still available even in our own day. What we are presently calling “church” isn’t fooling anyone, except perhaps ourselves.

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Even Kings Had Never Heard of IT!

Posted on January 8, 2019 by LovingLikeGod.com

“…and kings will shut their mouths because of him. For what they were not told, they will see, and what they have not heard, they will understand.” Isaiah 52:15

What was it that had not been told? What was it that they had never seen? What was it they had not heard? What was it that they were to understand? For that matter, do we understand it yet?

Before Jesus died – before He had the skin torn off His back – before he had His beard ripped out, and a crown of thorns planted into His skull, He had said:

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
John 15:13

Until the day that Jesus died, no one had ever seen a love greater than that! What kings got to see on the day He died was a love that was good for enemies:

“For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!” Romans 5:10 NIV

The King of all kings was about to found a kingdom on a love that was good for enemies. No one had ever seen, heard or understood anything like that before, and that is what we need to understand!

By Jay Ferris, originally posted on March 26, 2011

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